Men in Feminism: Odor di Uomo Or Compagnons de Route?*

Abstract

Anglo-American academic male critics do seem to be very into feminism these days. Younger…older…gay…straight men. What is striking is that most of these Anglo-American men tend only to speak of “women” or “feminism” in order to speak about “something else”—some “larger issue”—and then “women” are either reduced to bodily parts, abstract wholes (wh), or are spoken only in relation to other men. Elaine Showalter’s perceptive and indeed very funny article, “Critical Cross-Dressing” provides us with a cast of characters where this is especially so: for example, Wayne Booth emphasizes bodily parts in order to talk about “larger questions” of Interpretation, Bakhtin, and Rabelais; Robert Scholes meditates on the clitoris to talk about Semiotics; Jonathan Culler, taking the more abstract route, needs “woman” to talk about Deconstruction; and Terry Eagleton needs women to talk about Marxist Theory. There are some French pretexts here, but these remain very Anglo-American texts.

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